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Posts published by Austin Meyer

Nicholas Kristof and Austin Meyer in a rural village near Lucknow, India.Credit

Austin Meyer was Nicholas Kristof’s 2015 win-a-trip winner, and he traveled first to Baltimore, where he wrote about heroin use, and later to rural India and Nepal, where he wrote about malnutrition and cataract surgery. For students applying this year, and those curious about what it’s like to travel with Nick, Austin has answers. (Speaking of which, if you’re a student with a U.S. passport studying at a U.S. university and want to apply for his 2016 trip, here are the details.)

Liriel Higa: Austin, there were hundreds of applications, many of them excellent. It was hard to pick a winner! For those applying this year, any words of advice?

Austin Meyer: The way I approached my application was I focused on three different things. First, I wanted to show Nick who I am as a person. He has to travel with the winner for multiple weeks. So in my video I wanted to demonstrate a range of things I am passionate about and show my personality. Second, I wanted to illustrate how driven I am as a journalist — that I love telling stories of people in the world who are too often neglected. And third, I focused a lot of my essay on demonstrating why I wanted to go to rural Africa or India. Everyone would like to write for the New York Times… sure. But why do you want to tell stories about human rights abuses in the developing world? That’s not for everyone.

On my 2015 win-a-trip journey with Nicholas Kristof through India and Nepal, I spent most of the time reporting on issues related to extreme poverty, malnutrition and human rights abuses. As I wrote these columns, I battled feelings of futility and hopelessness. I was determined to change hearts and minds through human-centered stories, but I was afraid that the scale of the problems I was witnessing would engulf any efforts made to combat them.

But then I arrived in a town called Hetauda in southern Nepal to see the miracles performed by Dr. Sanduk Ruit and Dr. Geoffrey Tabin in their cataract surgery camp. Watching them blew away my fears. In just five minutes, I watched them cure people of blindness and change their lives forever. People like Purni Maya. Here’s how the 24-hour transformation looked.

Surgery day for Purni Maya starts out in a waiting room outside the hospital. She sits quietly in the corner on a pink colored mattress waiting her turn.

Purni Maya is 80 years old. She is a widow and mother of six children who lives in the rural mountains of Nepal. Maya is one of the 246 million people in the world with impaired vision. She has hazy vision in her left eye, and two months ago, went completely blind in her right eye due to cataracts. She says she can’t see me. I am sitting right next to her.

This past April, 14-year-old Pramila Moktan was a border checkpoint away from being a sex slave.

Pramila fell victim to a scheme that is being used to traffic thousands of Nepali girls. Living in desperate conditions, sleeping outside after her home was destroyed by the earthquake, an in-law relative offered her a well paying job in India.

Laxmi Moktan Lama didn’t want her only child to leave. But Pramila, who was uneducated and desperate for money, saw a life changing opportunity in front of her. So one morning at 5 a.m. she snuck away to meet the trafficker. She thought she would be making clothes, but her trafficker had other plans.

Thankfully, as she crossed the border into India, members of Maiti Nepal, a leading anti-trafficking organization, saw the young teenager and recognized the all-too-familiar scenario. Pramila was one of the lucky ones saved from a life of suffering, brutality and rape. And now she is back in her mother’s arms.Read more…

In rural villages like this one a normal child looks like 5-year-old Shanvi Yadav, there on the left — very small and very thin.

So Mishty is barely half Shanvi’s age but may weigh even more than her. They live about 100 feet from each other, but their opportunities to grow up healthy, both physically and mentally, are vastly different. When I met them and spoke to their families, I was struck by how early child-rearing practices were likely to result in dramatically different life trajectories for the two kids.Read more…

An endless line of motorcycles waits for petrol in Kathmandu, Nepal. October 13 marked the first day in almost two weeks that owners of private vehicles could purchase fuel in the capital.Credit Austin Meyer

KATHMANDU, Nepal — October 13 marked the first day of Nepal’s most celebrated holiday, Dashain. During this 15-day festival, people are supposed to be joyous, but instead, many Nepalis spent the entire day waiting in line for gas.

Due to an unofficial blockade imposed by India on its northeastern border that has restricted supplies like fuel to Nepal, a time of year meant for celebration has a very different feel.

“We have seen some rehab after the earthquake, but now it seems we have been pushed further back,” says Dr. Sanduk Ruit, an ophthalmologist living in Kathmandu. “The economy has gone down and people are suffering.”Read more…

UTTAR PRADESH, India — At 11:30 p.m., Kasim Ali had a chance to have his first meal of the day. His wife, Kasimun, brought him leftover dal and rice in a plastic bag. But crouched on the the hospital floor outside the pediatric intensive care unit, all he could say was, “How can I eat when my child is almost dead?”

Like Kasimun and Kasim, Nicholas Kristof and I began our day in Azim Nagar, a small village nearly 8,000 miles from the Stanford University campus from which I came for Kristof’s annual win-a-trip competition.

We were in Uttar Pradesh to learn why so many children there die before age five. If Uttar Pradesh were a country, it would have one of the world’s highest child mortality rates.

After a day hearing about the village’s poor conditions of prenatal and postnatal care, sanitation and nutrition, we saw exactly what the consequences of those practices are, and just how hard, in a state of 200 million people, it is to deal with them.Read more…

Dontay Burrell, left, and Sean Foley of Thread, before making their way to Douglas High School to enroll Dontay in summer courses that will allow him to graduate high school at the end of July.Credit Austin Meyer

Dontay Burrell, 21, is a former drug dealer from the same West Baltimore neighborhood that was home to Freddie Gray. With help from Thread, which helps high school students facing tough challenges in and out of school, Burrell is trying to earn his high school diploma.

Editor’s note: Austin Meyer is the winner of Nicholas Kristof’s 2015 Win-a-Trip contest. He will receive his master’s in journalism from Stanford University later this month.

The first time most guys go into a strip club, it’s party time. Alcohol pours. Dancers sell dreams. Groomsmen pick up the tab as lap dances go to the bachelor. A 21st birthday party ends with a crowded drunk selfie followed by some “tag me in that” pleas.

My first time in a strip club was a little different. I wasn’t there for a drink or lap dance. I wasn’t with my boys. I was with Nathan Fields, a community health educator for the Baltimore Public Health Department, as he made his weekly rounds at strip clubs on East Baltimore Street, or “The Block,” as it’s known.

When we entered the Diamond Club, the stripper poles were not in use. Pulsating music was the only thing that waded through the pink neon haze. Bar chairs were empty except for one exotic dancer. She had her hair slicked back and wore a thin pink bikini over the collage of tattoos on her skin. At nine o’clock, business hadn’t started.

“You know we got the van outside on the corner tonight,” Fields shouted to the dancer over the music. “Come on out. You can get trained to give Narcan in case someone overdoses.”Read more…

The availability of sanitary products isn’t simply a matter of budget lines and purchasing orders. It has to do with power. Read more…

About

This blog expands on Nicholas Kristof’s twice-weekly columns, sharing thoughts that shape the writing but don’t always make it into the 800-word text. It’s also the place where readers make their voices heard.